1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to techniques for accessing object properties in an object-oriented programming language. More specifically, the present invention relates to a method and an apparatus for supporting efficient access to object properties in a dynamic object-oriented programming language.
2. Related Art
Dynamic object-oriented programming languages facilitate extending the capabilities of program code and/or objects during execution, thereby providing substantial flexibility and power to program developers. However, there are often a large number of program locations in object-oriented systems that determine properties of different objects with different runtime types. Moreover, because object properties can change at runtime, accessing object properties in dynamic object-oriented programming languages can involve a large number of slow dynamic-lookup operations. For instance, many systems locate a property for an object by performing a slow dictionary-lookup operation, which can cause the object property lookup to become a major performance bottleneck.
Hence, what is needed is a system that facilitates accessing object properties in dynamic programming languages without the above-described limitations.